Hacking the hackers? United States spy agency at centre of apparent breach

“The chances of all these being faked or engineered is highly unlikely”, says the security company.

The tracking string in the manual, “ace02468bdf13579”, also appeared inside code for a software implant called “Second Date”, which was leaked as part of the archive posted earlier this week.

He explained that it was common for security services to attempt to target each other’s hacking tools in an effort to “create “fingerprints” to help us detect them in the future”.

The group claimed the files to be “better than Stuxnet, ” and were asking for 1 million bitcoins, or almost $600 million, for the best files in the bunch.

A cache of powerful hacking tools used by the National Security Agency have leaked online in what could be the biggest blow to the agency since 2013, when Edward Snowden came forward with documents that exposed the scope of its surveillance capabilities.

NSA itself has not commented on this information despite several reminders from the AFP.

Should Shadow Brokers receive total cumulative bids of over a million Bitcoins, roughly $500 million, the hackers say they may release the code for free. The names of some of the cyber tools feature in Snowden’s leaked documents including “epicbanana” and “bananaglee”. Others have linked the Equation Group to the NSA’s hacking arm, although such claims are extraordinarily hard to settle with any certainty.

“Without a doubt, they’re the keys to the kingdom”, one former TAO employee told the Post. The Equation Group’s attack platform and some of its tools were disclosed previous year by researchers at Kaspersky Lab, who said this week that the Shadow Brokers’ dump has a strong connection to the Equation Group.

It looks like “somebody sending a message” that retaliating against Russian Federation for its hacks of the political organisations “could get messy fast”, he said. Russian officials have dismissed the claims as paranoid or ridiculous, so the message delivered by Snowden – who resides at an undisclosed location in Moscow under the protection of the Russian government – struck many as significant.

Cisco said in a note on Wednesday that it “immediately conducted a thorough investigation of the files released”, identifying two flaws affecting Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) devices, which are typically used to protect networks and data centers.

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The question remains whether the Equation Group – or another USA -aligned or -allied hacking group, private contractor or intelligence agency – was actually hacked and, more immediately, whether the yet-to-be-released cyberweapons are as real as the teaser code.